A Brewing Dynasty Comes Home at Dynasty Brewing

One of Loudoun’s newest breweries is run by one of its most experienced brewers. And while Dynasty Brewing in Ashburn is new to the Loudoun scene, Favio Garcia is not.

The brewery is named for the Virginia Dynasty, the period of time when four of the country’s first five presidents were from the Old Dominion.

And Garcia has been making beer in Loudoun since Old Dominion Brewing—a now-defunct brewery that predated much of Virginia’s craft beer explosion and was the incubator for the people who would go on to start some of Loudoun’s most recognized breweries today.

And Garcia has had a hand in many of those, including as a co-founder of Lost Rhino Brewing Company. But after five years there—during which Lost Rhino has become of the biggest and most popular breweries in Loudoun’s booming beer scene—Garcia said it was time to try something new.

“I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Garcia said. “I didn’t know if I was going to be part of another brewery again, or give up brewing and do something else.”

But as soon as he left Lost Rhino, requests to help out or consult started pouring in. During that time, he also worked on and off at Beltway Brewing Company, the massive Sterling-based production brewery. Beltway founder Sten Sellier said Garcia’s experience was good to have.

“He’s very practically minded, and he’s seen it all,” Sellier said. “He’s seen a lot from the old days, if you will, to everything popping up today, and he knew how to get jobs done. He had seen enough that when people got stumped, it wasn’t new to him.”

Favio Garcia hooks up a new tank on the still-expanding Dynasty Brewing in Ashburn. [Renss Greene/Loudoun Now] Garcia was pulled in, and Loudoun did not lose one of its most experienced hands at a kettle. And it was on a consulting job that he ended up working with Dynasty co-founders Travis Thompson and Michelle O’Brian.

Thompson, a self-described “beer geek,” had been drinking Garcia’s work since the days of Old Dominion.

“Favio was helping us interview a lot of brewers, and getting us ideas where we should locate, and then that really didn’t get anywhere,” Thompson said. “After a while, I asked Favio, hey, why don’t you just join us? And he said yeah. Once he said that, we were full steam ahead.”

And Garcia experience isn’t the only element of Dynasty that goes back decades. He’s brewing on a 20-year-old system he and Thompson found in Seattle, and had put on five tractor trailers and shipped across the country to Ashburn.

“What I’m trying to do is make high-quality beer, so we’re not going to put anything on tap that we’re not going to drink ourselves,” Garcia said. And he said rather than have a house flavor across beers, he wants to create distinct beers: “Every beer will have its own personality, as it were, so our juicy pale ales taste different from our hazy pale ales.

Dynasty will be the smallest brewhouse Garcia has run for a while. And he said it’s a good time to go from big to small. He said customers today are looking for smaller, regional breweries, something he’s seen change in his career.

“Craft beer, for most of the time that I’ve been brewing, it’s always been about getting the bigger tanks and expanding. And a lot of breweries are going to do that,” Garcia said. “But as the number of breweries increases, the size of the breweries is going decrease.”

Dynasty Brewing is at 21140 Ashburn Crossing Drive. Find out more at dynastybrewing.com.

rgreene@loudounnow.com

Dynasty Brewing in Ashburn is named for the Virginia Dynasty, when four of the first five American presidents were Virginians.[Renss Greene/Loudoun Now]

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